Historic Philadelphia

PHILADELPHIA
COLLEGE OF
OSTEOPATHIC
MEDICINE
✧
Right: PCOM students share a strong belief
in the osteopathic philosophy and a common
concern for the people and communities
around them.
HISTORIC PHILADELPHIA
154
“…Philadelphia College of Osteopathic
Medicine has earned its position among those
institutions that have assured the preeminence
of American medicine,” said C. Everett
Koop, M.D., former U.S. Surgeon General, on
the occasion of the College’s Centennial.
As Philadelphia College of Osteopathic
Medicine (PCOM) celebrated its 100th
anniversary in 1999, it called upon its experiences
of the last century to set the standard for
medical education in the future. The nation’s
largest osteopathic medical college and fifth
largest medical school, PCOM is uniquely prepared
to train physicians to practice medicine
in the twenty-first century.
PCOM entered the well-established medical
culture of Philadelphia in 1899. To date,
the College has trained more than 9,000 community-responsive,
caring physicians who
have the credentials and the compassion people
want from their doctors today, and are certain
to expect from their doctors in the future.
What is osteopathic medicine? Osteopathic
medicine is a unique approach to medical
care, focusing on treating a patient’s body,
lifestyle, and behavior as a whole. Simply put,
osteopathic medicine is not symptom-based,
but patient-based.
Doctors of Osteopathy (DO) are trained to
recognize that all of the body’s systems,
including the musculoskeletal system, are
interdependent, and a disturbance in one
causes altered function in other systems of the
body. With osteopathic manipulative medicine
(OMM), DOs use their hands to help
diagnose injury and illness and to encourage
the body’s natural healing tendency.
Osteopathic medical students receive the
same education as traditional MDs, with the
addition of up to 300 hours of training in OMM.
Osteopathic physicians can write prescriptions,
deliver babies, perform surgery, and practice
subspecialties. In 2001 the country will have
48,000 osteopathic physicians, according to the
American Osteopathic Association.
The primary care focus has been part of the
culture of PCOM, and osteopathic medicine,
for more than a century. It is central to the
College’s patient-based approach. In today’s
changing healthcare environment, PCOM is
ahead of its time.
PCOM trains more primary care physicians
than any other medical college in the country—
nearly seventy percent of its graduates choose
careers in primary care fields: family practice,
general internal medicine, obstetrics/gynecology,
and pediatrics. Many DOs serve in medically
underserved areas of the country.
A thriving, innovative college, PCOM was
founded in 1899 by osteopathic physicians
O. J. Snyder and Mason Pressly as the
Philadelphia College of Infirmary and
Osteopathy. Re-named Philadelphia College of
Osteopathy in 1921, the College added the
Training School for Nurses and Department of
Free Clinics. The clinics, which provided treatment
to those who could not afford medical
care, would became a critical component of
practical instruction for generations of students.